Lisu is a tonal Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Yunnan (southwestern China), northern Burma, and Thailand and a small part of India. It is the language of the Lisu minority. Lisu has many dialects that originate from the country in which they live. : Hua Lisu, Pai Lisu, and Lu Shi Lisu dialects are spoken in China. Although they are mutually intelligible, some have many more loan words from other languages than others.

The Lisu language is closely related to the Lahu and Akha languages and is also related to Burmese, Kachin, and Yi languages.

Lisu can be split up into three dialects: northern, central, and southern, with northern being the standard.

Orthography

Miao script

Sam Pollard's Miao (today's Hmong) script was used to write Lipo patois (lpo), a patois of central Yi dialect, which is also considered as eastern Lisu language.

Fraser alphabet

The Lisu alphabet currently in use throughout Lisu-speaking regions in China, Myanmar and Thailand was primarily developed by two Protestant missionaries from different missionary organizations. The more famous of the two is James O. Fraser, a British evangelist from the China Inland Mission. His colleague, who developed the original version of the alphabet (later revised and improved with Fraser and various colleagues from the C.I.M.) was Sara Ba Thaw, a polyglot Karen preacher based in Myitkyina, Burma, who belonged to the American Methodist Mission.

Ba Thaw had prepared a simple Lisu catechism by 1915. The script now widely known as the "Fraser alphabet" was finished by 1939, when Fraser's mission houses in the Lisu ethnic areas of Yunnan Province (China) received their newly-printed copies of the Lisu New Testament.

Lisu syllabary

From 1924 to 1930, a Lisu farmer called 汪忍波 invented the Lisu syllabary from the Chinese script. However, it looks more different from the Chinese script than Chu Nom and the Zhuang logograms (Sawndip). thumb|250px|Lisu syllabary

Latin Lisu alphabet

A new Lisu alphabet based on pinyin was created in 1957, but most Lisu continued to use the old alphabet. The Fraser alphabet was officially recognized by the Chinese government in 1992, since which time its use has been encouraged.

Phonology

Vowels

The symbol represents a fricative vowel.

and are in complementary distribution: is only found after palato-alveolars, though an alternate analysis is possible, with the palato-alveolars viewed as allophones of the palatals before and . The distinction originates from proto-Lolo-Burmese consonant clusters of the type *kr or *kj, which elsewhere merge, but where Lisu normally develops /i/, they remain distinct with the latter producing the type , the former the type . Inherited palatal affricates + /i/ also become .

Tones

Lisu has 6 tones: high (55), mid-high (44), mid (33), low (21), rising (35), and low checked (?21).

Consonants